Out for Tender

Wednesday, 13 August 2014 15:27

County Staff sending their Waste Management Strategy out for tender

WOODSTOCK - The County of Oxford is making changes to their Waste Management Strategy ahead of the tendering process.

Based on public feedback, the number of System Improvement Options has been reduced from 22 to 18 and the option to rename the Oxford County Landfill Site to the Oxford County Waste Management Facility to better represent what is done there was added.

Among the changes, Waste Management Coordinator Pam Antonio recommended that an additional blue box not be distributed to every household in the County as that came out loud and clear that residents were not for that option.

"We recommended that we do further study through the tendering process to obtain bid pricing on various different options for curbside collection programs as far as the frequency of garbage and recycling collection and the types of recycling system we would have in place, whether it would be a two stream or single stream system and report back to council."

Additionally, residents were very clear that the County should continue to provide the curbside large article collection program, but acknowledged that program changes were needed to prevent misuse.

Some of the feedback results from the public were contrary to to results seen in other municipalities and Antonio says this makes her wonder if they asked the right questions or if there were any mitigating factors at the time which would lead residents to respond the way they did.

"We received 266 responses and that will mainly, probably be from individuals who are most passionate about garbage and recycling and are probably already doing everything they should be doing as it is right now anyway's so we suspect that our numbers would probably reflect what the provincial numbers are but we are a rural community and rural communities do handle their waste differently than urban communities."

She says the next step is to release the tender documents for September.

"Obtain bid pricing on all the various different options that we have laid out in the strategy, then bring recommendations back to council in January on the types of programs based on what we have received through consultation and pricing, what we think would be the best fit for the County for the next seven years and then await their direction as far as whether they approve the recommendations or not."